Landraces

Cannabis landraces. The essential characteristic of landrace strains of cannabis is that they’re domesticates.

As Dr. Ernest Small writes in Cannabis: A Complete Guide –

‘The term landrace (land race) refers to populations of domesticated plants that were selected over many generations by farmers in a region.’

A literal modern translation of the German word ‘Landrasse’ is not ‘landrace’ but ‘country-breed’.

Cannabis landraces are product-specific traditional domesticates.

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Contrary to what you’ll read online, landraces have not merely ‘developed naturally’ independent of the hand of humanity. The crucial point to grasp is this: whether selected consciously or unconsciously, landraces are fundamentally creations of humanity for things we want, need, or enjoy.

Fibre, food, and drugs – medicinal or ‘intoxicating’ – are the three main uses for which cannabis is traditionally cultivated. In cannabis landraces, traits selected for by generations of farmers can include one or more of the following: high-quality bast fibre, large nutritious seeds, or resinous and aromatic inflorescences that are rich in THC.

The widespread popular belief that cannabis landraces are ‘natural’ or ‘wild’ plants – as if these strains were created by Nature itself – is very far from the mark. Misinformation about landraces remains rife among cannabis aficionados.

No doubt landraces are typically region-specific and adapted to their local environment through natural selection. In that sense, landraces are ‘natural’ or ‘naturalized’. But the defining characteristics particular to the various types of cannabis landrace result from farmers consciously and unconsciously selecting for desired products, a process of human-driven creation that in regions such as Central Asia has taken place over many millennia.

Nor, in fact, are landraces ‘unhybridized’. Most good landraces probably originated as hybrids between two or more landraces. Farmers in Lao and Isan, relatedly, even refer to their good landraces as ‘pan basom’ (ພັນປະສົມ; ‘hybrid strains’).

Crucially, what cannabis landraces are is product-specific. Drug-type cannabis landraces can be grouped into two main types: charas landraces and ganja landraces. These correspond to Small and Cronquist’s grouping of northern versus southern – aka, Indicas versus Sativas.

Northern landraces were domesticated principally for production of cannabis resin (charas) by a process of bulk selection and are found from eastern Central Asia through the Hindu Kush and Near East to as far west as Morocco. Southern landraces were domesticated principally for production of sinsemilla or semi-sensi (ganja) through individual plant selection and originate in tropical and subtropical India and Southeast Asia, and are the most widely globalised cannabis landraces – a process that began in the Age of Sail.

The geographic centres in which these two main groups of drug-type cannabis landraces are autochthonous are probably eastern Central Asia (‘Indicas’) and the peripheries of the Bay of Bengal (‘Sativas’). They correspond to the two high-end traditional cannabis drug products, charas and ganja. Because of their history of individual selection – which is enabled by ganja culture, where consumers or famers can keep seed from superior batches of bud – good landrace Sativas are significantly more potent than authentic landrace Indicas.

A third type of drug-type cannabis landrace is comprised by the multipurpose landraces of the Himalaya, which may be representative of the most ancient form of Cannabis domesticate. These multipurpose Himalayan strains are cultivated for three products: fibre, food, and drugs.

By contrast to the above three groups, actual wild-type forms of cannabis can be classified as distinct formal varieties from landraces using a classical taxonomic key.

In addition to the two high-end traditional products – ganja and charas – there is the most basic form of traditional cannabis drug product, bhang, which in practice usually comprises coarse seeded inflorescences and leaflets. Bhang can be prepared from any plant from these landrace or wild-type populations. Landraces that are specific to bhang production can be found in the Punjab and southern Pakistan. In the Middle East, this product can be referred to by names such as ‘kif’ or ‘hashish’ – the latter name often wrongly assumed by western aficionados to be exclusive to dry-sieved resin (i.e., charas).

Crucially, drug-type cannabis landraces and their wild-type relatives are an invaluable reservoir of biodiversity and are critically endangered.

For authoritative information, see the essential 2020 study from McPartland & Small, ‘A classification of endangered high-THC cannabis (Cannabis sativa subsp. indica) domesticates and their wild relatives’. There’s a response from Angus of The Real Seed Company here: ‘Endangered Cannabis Landraces: An Overview’.

For more about the term ‘landrace’ – misleading as it is – see What’s the Real Meaning of ‘Landrace’?